As used herein, the term "special service" is a dedicated communication capability provided through a network for the exclusive use of a specific customer. The special service may be any one of a large set of possible electronic communications services. The types of communication services which may belong to the set are well known and include: 1) ordinary point-to-point voice communications services, 2) ordinary point-to-point data services (e.g., 4.8 kbit/sec), 3) facsimile services, and 4) high speed (e.g., 45 Mbit/sec) data special services. The characteristics of a special service are determined by the equipment that is employed in a special service circuit that provides the special service. Equipment used for providing special services typically includes: a) a customer premises device at each endpoint of the circuit, which device is typically provided by the customer; b) a access channel to each endpoint typically provided by a local exchange carrier (LEC); c) central office equipment which supports the features of the special service, that equipment most often being located in a point of presence (POP) of a long distance carrier to provide both switching and conditioning facilities for the circuit and d) an interoffice transport facility which connects the POPs together.
Typically, each step in the prior art arrangements for provisioning a special service is an independent procedure performed by a separate system. In an exemplary prior art arrangement, a customer's request for a special service is received by a first system. Thereafter, another system checks if sufficient switching, conditioning and transport facilities, capable of being interconnected to provide the special service between the requested endpoints, appear to be available in an inventory of network facilities. In fact, some or all of the facilities appearing to be available are often not actually available. This is because configuring and implementing the requested special service, which is the next step in the process, is performed via human operations. Such operations result in poor records of the actual facility usage due, for example, to configuration implementation errors, failure to properly record facility usage, and delays in reposing on-the-spot substitution of different facilities for those originally designated to be employed. Once the special service is configured, it is tested, and, upon a successful test, its control is handed over, or delivered to, the customer. These prior art arrangements are slow and cumbersome. They also tend to fail, a large factor in such failure being the noted involvement of people in critical stages of the process.
Another problem with these prior art arrangements is that they are only able to employ available transport facilities at the particular level specified in the requirements for the special service, e.g., so-called DS0, DS1 or DS3. This requires the maintenance of an excessive inventory of transport facilities at each level, in order to meet present and future demands for special services at each level. Furthermore, should the special service provided fail at any point, separate restoration procedures are employed to restore operation of the special service as it was configured and delivered. This restoration process is often time consuming, depending upon the nature of the failure. Also, the customer is without the special service that failed for the lengthy duration of the failure.